


Cats & Cops

by nanchatte



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Multi, crack that went too far, rarepair, wannabe noir, your typical cop AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-15
Updated: 2016-03-15
Packaged: 2018-05-26 06:16:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,360
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6227089
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nanchatte/pseuds/nanchatte
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Officers Dirk Strider and Jake English have one mission: bring the nefarious gang, The Midnight Crew, to justice. Pre<i>fur</i>rably without the help of infamous cat burglar, Nepeta Leijon.</p><p>Starring sassy thieves, way too many cats, relationship drama, bad cop tropes, crossdressing detectives, collateral damage and a happy ending.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cats & Cops

“Thanks for the lead,” says Strider. He feels sweat trickle down his temple and drop onto the sizzling tarmac of the parking lot. His hair is plastered to his forehead and his stifling blue uniform sticks to him every time he so much as breathes. The yellow buildings in the distance are like a goddamn mirage in this unbearable heat, flickering in and out the haze.

Several yards away, his partner English sits in the patrol car. When Strider pockets his cell he stickily makes his way towards the vehicle and watches as English licks melted chocolate of his fingers. There’s an incriminating box of mushy, sweaty donuts on the dashboard.

English is listening to some terrible 1990s alternative rock on the car radio and he bobs his head slightly out of time to the beat. His face is slick and shining even despite the car’s air con and his glasses have slid a good few centimetres down his nose. He starts when Strider opens the passenger seat and slips inside, and Strider breathes out a rattling sigh of relief at the _slightly_ cooler air inside the car.

“Ninty-fifth street,” he snaps. “Hit it, chewie.”

English warbles, Strider laughs, and they perform a terrible reverse out of the parking lot, nearly bashing the rear-end into a trucker’s white van. Strider turns the sirens on and sits back to enjoy the bustling traffic disperse from him like ants under his boot as they career towards the midday sun.

“Who were you talking to?” English asks over the din. He still has chocolate on his fingers, smeared slightly onto the steering wheel. Strider can see, out of the corner of his eye, the saturated dark spots on his uniform under his armpits, and the pool of sweat nesting in his the crook of his bronze collarbone. He licks his lips.

“Leijon,” Strider admits. “She ratted out Noir for a heads up on Pyrope’s whereabouts. Ain’t nobody wanna be caught by Pyrope.”

“Don’t you mean _catted_ out?” English says with a bucktoothed grin, before noticing Strider’s raised eyebrow and realising the downright corniness of his dumb as shit joke. He clears his throat and steps harder on the accelerator. “Sorry,” he apologizes, quickly.

Streets fly past. After a particularly violent turn into the rabbit runs of the city’s inner alleyways, the car bouncing like its wheels are made of rubber, the donuts slide off the dashboard and smear next to Strider’s obsidian-black shoes. A mismatch of yellow and purple brick blur past the window into a sickening kaleidoscope, whirling this way and that as the car screams its way down the street. Something disturbs the flicker for just an instant but Strider notices it, holds up his hand, and English hits the brake so hard that they screech several yards onto the sidewalk, scattering pedestrians and causing a fire hydrant to erupt after a particularly brutal bump.

English pants obscenely, his eyes wild. Strider watches the black vehicle—as if Noir would be caught dead in any other colour—reverse and clatter back the way they came. Someone pokes his shiny carapacian head out the window, aims a shotgun and shoots. The bullet knocks the rearview mirror off the patrol car and through the spray of water, where the whole pavement is glistening wet with the collapsed hydrant, puddles forming almost torrentially in the gutter.

English doesn’t need an order to follow; he slams down on the pedal immediately and gives chase, his thick brows furrowed in concentration. Strider fumbles his own pistol out of the holster by his hip, fingers inarticulate with sweat, and rolls down his window. It’s times like these he wishes he were the one driving—not only is his steering precision more topnotch than English’s but his partner is a little more handy with a firearm. He forces his torso out into the open air—enjoys the cool breeze as English breaks the speed limit fifty times over—and aims the pistol at the black vehicle’s tyre.

He misses. The bullet chips off the rim of the exhaust and slams into the road. Strider quickly withdraws just as Droog’s counter shot flies past his ear.

“Yahoo!” English crows. He’s hunched over the wheel as if his own aerodynamics might make the patrol car faster and his glasses teeter dangerously on the edge of his nose. “That was a close one, Strider!”

Strider tries not to scowl. English executes another dramatic swerve, in time to dodge an onslaught of bullets, this time from Deuce’s machine gun. It’s broad daylight—too _much_ fucking daylight, in Strider’s photosensitive opinion—and the spray of gunfire creates an alarming symphony of shrieks and screams throughout ninety-fifth street. Strider holds up his hand again and English cries, “No way, Strider, we’ve almost grabbed the rascals!”

“Fucking hit the brake, English, we’ve got civilians in the line of fire here!”

The tyres squeal. A bullet from the opposition lodges itself into the windshield on English’s side, spiderwebbing the glass, and he catches his breath over the steering wheel, his glasses finally taking a slick tumble from his face. Strider observes quietly from their stopped car, chewing the inside of his lip as the black automobile rounds a corner out of sight.

“Oh blast it, blast it!” English hollers to his shoes. “What a barking disappointment of a car chase!”

***

Detective Crocker sits like a queen on her swivel chair, and she swivels a good inch to meet Strider’s eyes. There is matted bush of brown hair stuck above her upper lip, and it wobbles dangerously when she sighs.

“Darn it,” she snarls. “They got away.”

“We need faster cars,” English slams his palms down on the wooden desk, and Crocker’s stack of papers bounce from the force. “Race cars, maybe. And police pit stops on every block.”

Crocker doesn’t know whether he’s joking or not; Strider knows he’s entirely serious, so he subtly steps on English’s foot and watches his partner hiss out between the big gap in his teeth. The office smells like men’s cologne and old newspapers, and the unforgiving sunlight batters through the blinds and creates stripes of bright white across the dingy room. Strider narrows his eyes. “We’ve got to catch them somewhere in the open. Or at least somewhere fucking _uninhabited_.”

“Do you have to swear?” Crocker drawls, and Strider almost bristles. He’s cooking alive in the confines of his uniform, his head hurts from the siren wails and English is sending him a petulant expression of _why’d you step on me, Strider!_. He can almost feel the tinge of sunburn, too, across the bridge of his nose. There aren’t enough fuckings in all of paradox spaces’ fucking dream bubbles for this fucking situation.

“We need a lead again,” Strider replies sullenly, while hoping the detective won’t ask where his previous came from. “Let’s just wait.”

“Dangnabbit, Dirk, we could be waiting yonks!”

Crocker shakes her head. “No, Strider’s right. The Midnight Crew could be anywhere, and it’d be a waste of all of our time if we had you on this wild goose chase all night.” She leans back in her chair and gestures at the window, where specks of dust float illuminated in the sun. “Take a break, enjoy the weath—“ she stops, frowns for just a moment and then barks, “No, actually—fix that darned fire hydrant!”

How news of the civilian casualty to ninety-fifth’s street fire hydrant reached Detective Crocker so quickly, Strider does not know. He slams the door a little too hard on his way out.

***

Strider lets English do most of the work. He sits under the fluttering canopy of a nearby café, sipping at a glass of chilled orange soda and admiring the way English’s forearms swell with each twist of the wrench. English is still in uniform—the police broke the hydrant, so the police obviously have to _fix_ it—and he’s entirely soaked from the fountain of water he’s only just managed to stuff back in. It’s like something from—Dirk looks down at his drink—a bad orange soda commercial.

He appreciates the view, anyway, until someone slips into the squeaky white plastic seat next to him and forces a high-pitched _ahem_ from in between her painted lips. The troll is about five feet tall (including horns) and is wearing a large pair of green-rimmed sunglasses and a floral neckscarf. She’d pull off the fashionista look if her hair wasn’t dishevelled and her claws half bitten off.

“Hey, Leijon,” says Strider. “If you’re here to gloat, kindly go step onto the road and wait for the next cute little Vespa to streak your puke-green blood across ninty-fifth street.”

“ _Purrease_ , Strider,” Leijon legitimately _purrs_ , and damn it that’s not a long vogue cigarette she’s just pulled out of her leather handbag. “I’m not here to gloat. I’m here to applau—ap _paw_ d you!”

“Really,” says Strider, deadpan.

Leijon leans forwards and rests her cheek on her palm. Her other hand twirls the cigarette. It’s hard to determine her expression from behind those shades, but there’s a quirk of her lips Strider recognizes as smugness. “You could have been a little more sneaky! Less cops and robbers, more stealth and disguises and _pounce_! They’re in your claws like a squeakbeast!”

“You mean disguises like your crappy Breakfast at Tiffany’s audition?”

“Dirk,” Leijon hisses, and Strider can almost hear her eyes narrow. “I’m doing you a furrvour. Less sass, more _kickass_! The Midnight Mew aren’t your average crooks, and they’ve made me purretty furrious!” She doesn’t look it, not with that smile.

“So _that’s_ why you’re helping me. What happened?”

“They stole from me,” the troll admits. She blushes a little olive across her cheeks. “You can’t steal from a meowbeast burglar. It’s so… so… unfur!”

The laugh escapes him as a really undignified hoot, but Strider is too immersed in the irony of the situation to care. He takes a long sip from his soda, watching Leijon finally lose her grin and then he finally asks, “What’d they steal?”

She sighs and takes an imaginary drag from her cigarette. “My meowrail. If when you catch those fluffians and hurt Equius in the crossfire, I’ll scratch off your testicles and feed it to my lusus.”

“Well, you’ve got me clawnered,” Strider raises his hands in mock-surrender. “Guess I’ll have to be extra careful when I bust open their base, guns blazing.”

Leijon snorts unattractively, deeply contradicting her current disguise. She scrapes back her seat with a plastic squeal and gets to her feet, swaying a little on the heels. “Clawnered! That’s a good one!”

“Thanks,” Strider drawls. His eyes leave the troll to linger on English, who’s circling the fixed fire hydrant with a lopsided grin on his face, spinning the wrench in his hand and looking stupidly proud of himself. “I try.”

Leijon leans down, plants a messy lipstick peck to his cheek and whispers smoothly, “I’ll keep in touch!” She disappears quickly, in a flurry of her summer dress and English stalks up to the table just as Strider rubs at the red mark on his face, a distinctive blush settling beneath his glasses that has nothing to do with the sun. A group of girls from across the road watch English with slightly wistful, disappointed expressions on their faces now that he’s no longer prancing around with a wrench, dripping from every pore.

“Well that’s that,” English barks cheerfully, lounging down on the seat Leijon’d just vacated, hands behind his head. “A man’s errand done for the day, don’t you think?” He leans in close as Strider downs the rest of his soda and observes, grin faltering, “I say, Strider, you’re looking rather red.”

“It’s this fucking sun,” Strider growls, maybe a little too defensively. He slams his glass onto the plastic table with a rattle of ice. “Get me another soda. I’m gonna melt.”

English salutes and is swallowed by the shadow of the café, whistling an almost _too_ upbeat tune as Strider continues to wipe at his cheek, thoroughly unnerved.

***

The hotel room is fittingly dingy and decrepit. The wallpaper is an awkward beige geometric pattern and is peeling in about fifteen different spots and the only light comes from a swinging bulb almost detached from the stained ceiling. The bed’s a single and creaks loudly if it’s so much as breathed on—which is problematic for one major reason:

Jake’s handcuffed to the headboard and his trousers are bunched up to his ankles. The only perks to the police, Dirk thinks, is the toys; handcuffs and the guns, especially. All in all, to rent a hotel room as an officer of the law on a top secret stakeout has its pros, even if the springs scream more than the people.

When Dirk clambers over Jake, knees on either side of his waist, Jake swallows loudly over the bed’s whinging and says, “Dirk, wait.”

There’s an odd expression on his face, something akin to _suspicion_ which is bizarre in itself because Jake is so gullible and thoughtless that Dirk had barely believed suspicious existed in his vocabulary. He raises an eyebrow. “You’ve got the fucking Russian circus in the big top that is your underwear, Jake. You _really_ don’t want me to wait.”

Dirk lets his fingers dance up Jake’s sides and watches with a swell of victory as his breath hitches and his hips roll. “I think you’re cheating on me,” he wheezes, eyes screwed shut and front teeth practically puncturing his bottom lip. Dirk freezes.

“What?”

“You are,” Jake continues, cracking open one brilliantly emerald eye. “When you cuffed me to the bed you said, and I am _not_ kidding you, Strider—“ he takes a deep breath and puts on his best Dirk Strider impression, which Dirk hates because it’s kind of painfully accurate, “ _You’ve been declawed, pussycat._ ”

“I didn’t say that,” Dirk snaps, because that’s the stupidest dirty talk he’s ever heard and if he’s _anything_ , it’s one smooth motherfucker in the sack.

“I mean,” Jake babbles. “In this scenario, it’s usually something like—“ the voice is back again, and Dirk cringes. “ _How’d you like your tomb robbed, English?_ Or: _Trespassing on national museum property is a two year prison sentence, but if you suck my dick real nice I’ll let you go_.”

Dirk is fairly certain that his face is going to drip off and slop all over Jake’s shirt by how much it’s boiling—he is highly tempted to put his hand over Jake’s mouth to stop him from talking. “I only say shit like that ‘cause it gets you off,” he replies a little testily. “It’s not my fault corny cop lines make you cream your pants.”

“I know, it’s bloody hot,” Jake moans. “But pussycat? _Seriously_?”

“Okay, so I give you a new shitty pet name, so fucking what?” Dirk can feel his heart racing, and all of a sudden the crappy hotel room feels too hot and stuffy and the heat in his stomach dies into a deep, sinking sensation. Nepeta’s face flashes through his mind like a curse. “Doesn’t mean I’m cheating on you, for fuck’s sake.”

Jake has both eyes open now. He looks decidedly pathetic—and a touch hurt—as he says, “The lipstick mark two days ago. Some girl kissed you.”

“That was—“ Dirk starts as he notices a flash of victory in Jake’s eyes. “Entirely nonconsensual.”

“I don’t believe you,” Jake replies moodily. “Get off me.”

Dirk rolls off and throws himself onto the other single, face buried in the pillow, his erection throbbing. He, admittedly, doesn’t know what’s worse: using a stupid cat line on Jake, or being subconsciously turned on by a cat burglar that he uses the stupid cat line to begin with. He stifles a groan and doesn’t even look up when, two minutes later, Jake asks a little bit sheepishly, “Please uncuff me, Dirk.”

***

The stakeout, while sexually unsuccessful, wields a result. Strider peers out the hotel window as Heart Boxcars slips into the liquor shop across the road at five past one in the morning, looking somewhat agitated as his big head turns left and right. The dolt thinks he’s being followed; which he is. Strider looks up, and sees Leijon on the roof of the terrace. She gives him a cheerful wave and his stomach lurches.

English snores, limbs everywhere on his own single, a tanned ankle hanging off one side. He’s out like a light and as Strider watches Leijon quietly shrink into the darkness, he’s glad English is tuckered out. He’d rather snoop around on his own after the night’s dreadful performance, and he certainly doesn’t need English’s cagey stares on his back while Leijon of all people is around, purring at him with her entirely moronic cat puns and letting her troll-orange claws linger on his forearm a bit longer than necessary. Strider shivers despite the humidity—the air con in the hotel room is so useless it might as well not be there.

A disguise hangs off the room’s rail, courtesy of Detective Crocker. Strider’s is the typical drab slummy affair: a leather jacket with some bright red Japanese kanji plastered melodramatically on the back, skinny black jeans with way too many chains to be ironic and biker boots that ought to be burned. Strider isn’t sure what Crocker was going for here—grungy boyband hooker or tryhard undercover cop. For the sake of the mission, Strider regrettably hopes it’s the former.

The jeans are a little too tight and every movement is an abrasive rub of fabric. The chains jangle slightly as he tugs them, hot and frustrated, over his thighs and ass and he can’t stop shooting nervous glances to English’s sleeping form—stupid, for he’s never known English to wake up from anything, let alone his hushed attempt to squeeze into a dickcrushing pair of jeans. The jacket is big enough to hang breezily over his torso, and Strider stuffs a pistol into the large pocket. He takes his sunglasses off and leaves them on the bedside table, beside a previous customer’s ashtray filled to the brim with half-smoked cigars.

The night air is stuffy, and Strider begins to sweat in the leather. He crosses the road and leans casually against a streetlamp, the light flickering around a horde of moths. Almost immediately Leijon’s at his side, barely reaching his elbow. She’s in leather too—depressingly skin-tight and glowing yellow around the edges in the streetlight. She grins up at him with a mouthful of fangs.

“Thought you were leaving the busting up to me,” Strider says out the corner of his mouth. Leijon doesn’t look particularly incognito—he imagines Boxcars won’t buy his disguise if he’s hanging out with the rogue they’ve kidnapped the moirail of, but the gangster is nowhere to be seen. The liquor shop is dead-black and empty-looking.

“I just had to see what you guys were up to,” Leijon beams. “You and Officer English are _so_ cute together!”

Strider scoffs. “We had the curtains closed.”

“Pawlease! I’m not a voyeur! I just appurreciate a good romance!”

“Well, your ship’s sunk.”

Leijon’s eyes glitter peridot, and she says without an inch of concern in her voice, “Oh no! What happened?”

Strider isn’t sure whether he wants to wrap his hands around her scrawny neck and wring it, or whether he wants to pin her against the streetlamp and stick his tongue down her throat. Instead, he remains rational and completely in control (hah), his fingernails digging crescent-moons into his palm. “None of your business. What are you doing here?”

The troll pouts and clams up. Strider doesn’t press the issue—he has the sinking suspicion that Leijon is here for a reason completely unrelated to her moirail, and highly related to him. He catches her studying him every so often as they stand together in silence, waiting. As soon as Boxcars exits the liquor store, however, Leijon vanishes from his side as quickly as she appeared, not even a breeze to mark her departure. Strider is sure she’s watching from somewhere nearby, expertly camouflaged into the shadows between trashcan and curb, or roof and awning.

Boxcars notices his presence almost immediately. Strider pretends to busy himself with a fan of viridian boondollars which, in hindsight, wasn’t the best idea. Boxcars approaches him with the tact and intimidation of a freight train, all four hundred pounds of him casting Strider in shadow under the streetlight.

“Odd place for a hooker.” His voice is like a tin rattle. Before Strider can stuff the money back into his pocket the carapacian has grabbed his wrist and is picking the notes out of his hand like petals from a flower.

“I’m not a hooker,” Strider says as innocently as possible. His glance darts just briefly to the opposite side of the street—Leijon is lounging on the windowsill of his hotel room, only the olive of her eyes visible. Boxcars follows his gaze, but the troll’s gone.

“Naw, you’re not,” the gangster’s free hand moves towards the pocket of his jacket and fondles the outline of his firearm there. Strider’s stomach sinks dramatically. “Hooker’s ain’t usually armed.”

The carapacian’s grip on his wrist is borderline excruciating, and Strider has to steel his expression to preserve his poker face. He’s sure that if he wanted to, Boxcars could grind his bones into dust between his fingers. Instead, his hand snakes into Strider’s leather jacket and retrieves the pistol, pushing up his chin with the barrel. Strider now has a strained view of the moth-ridden streetlamp, and the light burns at his eyes until they water. “You a cop?”

“ _No_ ,” says Strider, with all the feigned derision he can muster.

“Then what are you?”

The lie slips out of his lips before he can help himself and he snarls, “I’m meeting someone—she stole something for me, and I was here to pay her with the money you just took.”

Boxcar’s pitch-black face wrinkles as much as a carapacian’s skin can allow. “She?”

Strider, for all his inner panic, has never been one to crumble under pressure—or the excruciating grip of an oversized douchebag. His arm twinges as he grits out, “A troll, pretty damn tiny, makes a load of stupid cat puns.”

“ _Leijon_ ,” Boxcars says, dramatically. Strider nods. After a pause for effect, the thug asks, “Where is she?”

Strider waves his free arm over to his hotel room, pitch-black with the shabby lace curtains drawn as much as rags possibly can be. Leijon is long gone for the windowsill, and Strider silently prays that she hasn’t overheard his fibs. The last thing he needs is the damn troll ruining his cover in the name of a good hateflirt.

If that’s what this is—this troll thing called _kismesitude_. Now is totally not the time to be thinking about that.

The carapacian finally lets go of his wrist. With the butt of Strider’s pistol, he pushes him across the road and towards the hotel. The name of it ( _PLEASANT DREAMS_ only the ‘L’ hangs lopsidedly off the building) flickers in orange-yellow light. “What the hell is she stealing from inside that dump?” Boxcars asks, incredulous.

“There’s a cop in there. He’s got some pretty incriminating evidence on me.”

“I’d say those pants were pretty incriminating.”

“Ha, ha.”

Having the barrel of his own gun pressed against the small of his back is a surreal, unnerving experience—Strider really doesn’t get what English sees in guns, and thinking of his partner while leading a well-known thug up the stairs towards their shared hotel room is only making an uncomfortable feeling of guilt envelope him. What if Boxcar’s shoots Jake on sight? It’s not as if Strider’s done well to hide English’s identity, and for all he knows, the damn moron is probably still wearing his cop getup with the pants around his ankles.

Strider chews the inside of his cheek all the way as they creep along the corridors. The receptionist—a balding troll with horns too big for his head—is asleep at the desk, which is probably a good thing; Strider doesn’t doubt that Boxcars is pretty trigger-happy. “What’s the room number?” He spits, his voice like the crack of a shotgun. The troll snores on.

“Um. Four-eight-four.”

They take the suspiciously creaky, temperamental elevator. Boxcars barely fits inside, and Strider spends most of the ascent pressed in between the carapacian’s massive bulk and the remainder of space that isn’t taken up by hulking obsidian flesh. He has to hold his breath and suck in his stomach, and when the doors finally open to reveal the dark and peeling fourth floor Strider concentrates on inhaling some much-needed oxygen as he’s pushed out of the doors with a highly insulting tap on the ass with the pistol.

Room eight-four is down a maze of entirely nonsensical corridors. Boxcars spends most of the journey not using his indoor voice and proclaiming loudly the many atrocities Leijon has committed against the Midnight Crew, and how he can’t wait to skin her with her own claws, or stuff her in a sack full of rocks and throw her off a bridge. Strider can’t help but agree with most of the crook’s statements, and the idea of subjecting Leijon to a grisly end is somewhat nice to think about—of course, what Boxcar’s doesn’t mention is the way Leijon’s wide variety of expressive grins is tantalizing, and how her voice goes straight to his groin when she purrs _Strider_.

The walk to the hotel room has never felt this long before. It’s as if Boxcars’ presence has distorted time so that the gangster can fit in as much dumb talk as he possibly can before a showdown with some staked-out cop. Strider tries to control his heartbeat, but his veins are thrumming with a mixture of fear and adrenalin. As soon as Boxcars kicks open their door, things are going to become undeniably messy, and Strider isn’t sure whether that will work in his favour.

“Four-eight-four,” Strider hisses when he spies the bronze numbers, the barrel of the gun digging into the small of his back. It’s as if Boxcars is taking some perverse pleasure in having Strider squirm every time he _twists_. “Can we get this over with?”

 _Getting this over with_ is the enormous carapacian’s grand shove, which splinters the door immediately in half, and a kick which causes it to fly across the room and flatten Strider’s bed, which is when Strider realises his massive oopsie. Boxcars wastes no time in grabbing him by the neck and pinning him against that ugly beige wall, the pistol stuffed so hard under his chin he’s surprised he can still breathe.

“A single cop on a stakeout needs a double, huh?” And then, presumably to English: “Don’t move, or I blow his fucking brains out!”

Strider sincerely hopes that English doesn’t move as he’d rather not be a bloody splatter on the wall, but from his panicked view over the gangster’s big, black shoulder he can see absolutely no one. English’s bed in unmade, and one handcuff still hangs incriminatingly from the headboard, but the man in question is nowhere to be seen. Boxcars clearly notices this too because the pistol digs into his flesh harder and he growls, “Where’s your partner?”

Strider considers lying, but at this point it’s probably moot. Boxcars might be huge, but he isn’t stupid. Strider pants, neck straining, “I don’t know.”

There really is only one place English could be—the guy can’t fit under the beds, and there’s no closets in the room. At the same time, both Strider’s gaze and Boxcar’s flickers over the door to the ensuite bathroom. Strider feels his adam’s apple slide against the gun at his throat and his pulse quickens. It’s so quiet in the room now that Strider almost convinces himself he can hear English’s controlled breathing, the tightening of calloused fingers over a weapon.

Someone warned English that their stakeout was compromised. There’s only one other who knew the two where here, and a glimmer of something he’d like to think of as _admiration_ tickles in his veins, a thrum. Together, Leijon and English have trapped Boxcars, and the gangster is going to fall into their trap like a bear in a pitfall.

“Alright,” Boxcar’s growls lowly, releasing Strider from his hold and pushing him towards the ensuite. “I wanna see your buddy drop his weapons and come the fuck outta there, or else you’re gonna have a few extra holes for him to fuck.”

“That’s gross,” Strider says, and the Carapacian just shrugs and looks over to the handcuffs on the headboard. 

Constantly aware of the gun pointed at his back, Strider approaches the bathroom door and raises his voice. “Jake? You in there? Guy has a pistol on me and I’m pretty sure he’s gonna use it if you don’t come out.” He pauses. “Without your weapon.”

It’s somewhat infuriating, not having any idea what English’s plan is—or if he even has one. It’s not like his partner to think quickly on his feet, and neither is Leijon particularly good at anything other than escape arts and cat puns. Still, he reached out his hand for the door handle and opens it a fraction, to peer inside the grimy bathroom. The stained shower curtain is drawn, the broken toilet seat is up and English is nowhere to be seen. Strider frowns and turns his head slightly.

“He’s not in there—oh.”

Boxcars is four hundred pounds of knocked out, and Leijon sits on his spine, licking blood from the back of her knuckles, unnervingly cat-like.

“Where’s Jake?” Strider asks, staring from the gangster face-down on the carpet, to the troll’s smug grin and glittering green eyes. He can’t help but be impressed with how easily the diminutive burglar took down Boxcars, but also irritated he would probably be bleeding out from numerous holes if not for her intervention.

Nepeta gets to her feet with well-practiced grace. She saunters over and Dirk watches her hips, his heart racing. She stops too close to him, her little body pressed against his, and she takes his jaw and yanks on it. “I gave your partner somewhere else to be.”

That sounds suspicious. Dirk frowns. “What did you do to him?”

Nepeta is looking at him like he’s a saucer of high-quality cream, and while Dirk wouldn’t usually allow a girl’s hungry gaze to bother him, he feels his heartbeat gallop like a racehourse. “Let’s just say Officer English is otherwise engaged with a purglary on eight-eighth street. Happy?”

She doesn’t give Dirk much time to reply before her fangs find his lips in a bruising, completely satisfying kiss that he can’t help but return. She pushes him towards Jake’s abandoned bed (his still crushed by a door) and tugs fruitlessly at the too-tight jeans until Dirk has to perform a certain type of acrobatics to remove them. Nepeta has a feline flexibility to her that Dirk could only have imagined in his wildest dreams, and when she leaves him with olive-coloured spunk splattering his thighs he has to sit in a few moments of disbelief before he can rush to the bathroom and try to salvage an appearance of dignity, the sun blaring through the open window.

When he returns to the bedroom, Jake is already there with bags under his dimming green eyes and what looks like the beginning of a nasty bruise across his bloody nose. Whatever ‘purglary’ he’d been sorting out, it looks to have gone hairy.

“I can explain the door,” says Dirk quickly. Then his eyes find Boxcars, still out cold on the floor. “And the unconscious gangster.”

“And these?” says Jake, holding up a pair of paw-printed panties with all the expression of a kicked puppy.

 _Fuck you, Leijon,_ is a mantra Strider repeats in his head as he drives himself and a seething English back to headquarters in an uncomfortable silence, Boxcars grumbling threats and rattling his handcuffs in the backseat.


End file.
